Page:Aeneid (Conington 1866).djvu/223

'What forms of crime are these?' he cries
'What shapes of penal woe?
What piteous wails assault the skies?
O maid! I fain would know.'
'Brave chief of Troy,' returned the seer,
'No soul from guilt's pollution clear
May yon foul threshold tread:
But me when royal Hecat made
Controller of the Avernian shade,
The realms of torture she displayed,
And through their horrors led.
Stern monarch of these dark domains,
The Gnosian Rhadamanthus reigns:
He hears and judges each deceit,
And makes the soul those crimes declare
Which, glorying in the empty cheat,
It veiled from sight in upper air.
Swift on the guilty, scourge in hand,
Leaps fell Tisiphone, and shakes
Full in their face her loathly snakes,
And calls her sister band.
Then, not till then, the hinges grate,
And slowly opes the infernal gate.
See you who sits that gate to guard?
What presence there keeps watch and ward?
Within, the Hydra's direr shape
Sits with her fifty throats agape.
Then Tartarus with sheer descent
Dips 'neath the ghost-world twice as deep
As towers above earth's continent
The height of heaven's Olympian steep.
'Tis there the eldest born of earth,
The children of Titanic birth,
Hurled headlong by the lightning's blast,
Deep in the lowest gulf are cast.